After the Club's Open Day appearance, our target for April was to wire up the two baseboards we had. Additionally we had to do some prep work on scenic features.

The wiring was done on the two "Long Wednesdays" in the month. The layout is to be wired for DCC operation so the first task was to lay in the track bus. This was created using thick power cabling salvaged from an office rewiring many years ago. The cable was originally intended to carry 60+ amps so is a little bit overkill on the power front but your blog writer had it lying around. The outer plastic shield was stripped off and the two inner cables were run through brass eyelets screwed into the underside of the track sub-bases. As the cables are each a single copper wire, they can be bent to shape and they stay like that.

Dropper wires were then soldered to the rails. One of our junior members gained his first experience of soldering on this task and he did pretty well.

On the second Wednesday the dropper wires were soldered to the track bus. A small section of insulation was removed, the copper cleaned up with a bit of emery and the dropper wire wrapped around and secured through soldering. All nice and robust and no loss of voltage detected in testing.

Inter-baseboard connections use male/female terminal connectors, cut to provide four way connections

Two connections are for the DCC trackbus and the other two reserved for a 12v DC power bus for things like point motors and servos. Other club layouts use 25 pin D-type connectors, sometimes referred to as RS-232 though that standard is not really an accurate description. Your blog writer has lived with those in the IT industry for decades and hates them with a passion, hence they are banned from this layout.

A test run was done at the end of the last April meeting using an Electrotren 0-6-0T and success meant the April target was achieved.

Horsham Stone roofing

It's been mentioned before that our chosen area has a distinctive architectural trait, namely Horsham slates on roofs. These are locally quarried slates, a form of sandstone created aeons ago when a layer of calcium rich rock got pressed between layers of sandstone. It's unusual, not many quarries contain it and it is quite tricky to work. The key factor for modellers like ourselves is that Horsham slates are significantly thicker than tiles or Welsh slates and thus need a different approach to being modelled. The slates are also irregular in size which adds to the challenge. We do have a club member who has laid such roofs for real and he has given us good advice.

One of the first buildings to be tackled is this row of cottages.

Until around 1905 these cottages housed the Dog and Bacon pub, which still exists in the newer building next door. Our intention is to restore the pub to its original home. As will be noted, the left hand cottage is probably from a later date, being both taller and having a clay tile roof. The right hand cottages however have a Horsham stone roof.

Various experiments were done, and it was settled that the slates would be modelled using textured paper and thin card. A bit of jiggery-pokery was done in GIMP to create a map of the roof from this picture and then a cutting plan created for the Silhouette cutter. This meant that the two layers of paper and card would line up perfectly. Once stuck together the roof could be built up in the normal way.

It's a bit fiddly, but the result looks good. Our ex-roofer gave it the thumbs up, which is as much as we can hope for.

Next month is grit our teeth and do track ballasting as well as make a start on landscaping.